Cloud Security Alliance to create Australia-NZ chapter

Australia will host a local chapter of the international Cloud Security Alliance to provide a Australia/New Zealand voice to the global Cloud secuity advocacy group.

The Alliance, whose members include Dell chairman, Michael Dell, is a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud computing. More than 200 companies and 15,000 individual members have joined the Alliance so far.

Hewlett Packard Australia Cloud security chief technologist ,Archie Reed, who is recruiting for members for the Alliance, told delegates at IDC's Transformative ICT conference in Sydney this week said recent outages such as the Amazon elastic Cloud computing (EC2) outage which affected some Australian businesses highlighted the need for greater Cloud security professionals.

"That doesn't mean they have to come from IT because the perspective about what it is important and what risks can be taken is not just an IT decision, it's one for businesses and the country as a whole," he said. "Anybody is welcome to join and there are announcements with the Alliance Linkedin page."

Reed joked that the Alliance was using the Linkedin Cloud -- which contains a lot of public information on its members -- "for better or worse."

He said the Alliance would have meetings over the next few months to start up a chapter in Australia and would invite customers as well as Cloud vendors to become members.

"The importance of that [chapter] is that we develop standards and metrics, we have guidelines and we also a certification test to get people thinking about security in the Cloud, not just for security sake but from a business perspective," Reed said.

While he would not say which Australian companies had signed up, he confirmed that 30 individuals from various companies were interested in forming a local chapter.

"It's a 50/50 split between vendors and private companies," he said. "You join as an individual but you have to state if you have an affiliation to a vendor."

While Reed would like the chapter to be national, he also wants to see some regional efforts happening in cities such as Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

"We want to make sure that the Australian and New Zealand viewpoints are put on the table," he said.

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